Putting a Price Tag on Enterprise Mobility Productivity Gains

There is at least one thing that nearly everyone seems to agree on in these polarizing times: Investments in enterprise mobility will yield rich returns in the form of productivity increases – for end users and the overall business.

In fact, nearly 80% of IT and security professionals identified an increase in worker productivity as the greatest benefit of enterprise mobility in a recent survey commissioned by Dimension Data.

But try to affix a monetary value to those increases, and anything resembling a consensus quickly vanishes.

Simple Calculation

Actually, figuring out a simple calculation for ballparking the potential financial gains related to extending work hours through anywhere, anytime access to corporate email and other common productivity apps isn’t all that difficult. Here’s a back-of-the-napkin example:

For the sake of simplicity, assume the integration of smartphones and tablets into the day-to-day duties of the typical worker resulted in 15 minutes of additional daily productivity per worker, averaged across the entire employee base. Using this scenario and assuming a proportional relationship between revenue and work hours, a company with 100 employees and revenues of $10 million, could theoretically see an annual revenue boost of $310,000.

Sophisticated Forms of Mobility

You’ll need to rip up the napkin, though, when it comes to calculating potential revenue generation through more sophisticated forms of mobility, such as the mobilization of critical business processes. Productivity gains reaped through pushing behind-the-server data closer to the business moments is more difficult to put a number on.

In addition to boosting worker productivity and efficiency, fully exploiting the potential of mobility is expected to lead to the introduction of innovative services and products, as well as attract new customers through improvements in competitive positioning.

The absence of a clear ROI model for enterprise mobility, though, hasn’t stopped ambitious enterprises from making their businesses better through mobility.

Here are a couple of examples:

Tapping into Productivity

The Orlando Brewing Co., a beer manufacturer and supplier active in Florida’s Lake Buena Vista region, experienced significant productivity and competitive advances through adoption of a custom corporate application leveraging mobility and real-time sales and inventory information, according to company officials.

The mobile app allows company representatives to access their customers’ inventory and sales information at any time from their smartphones. This capability significantly increases the brewing company’s responsiveness, ensuring that their customers don’t run out of product and that it’s supplying the bars and restaurants it serves with the beer best matched to their clientele.

Provincia Seguros, an Argentine insurance company, completely streamlined its auto insurance underwriting process through mobility. The company, which has 29 offices across Argentina, recently introduced a mobile application that enables sales agents to complete an insurance claim in a fraction of the time once required.

The ability to process the entire claim, including submission of photos, from a mobile device has been well received by Provincia Seguros employees and customers, who often encountered delays or the need to schedule a second appointment. The monetary gains coming from the replacement of paper forms and increases in end user productivity are likely to be significantly surpassed by the financial benefits associated with an improved customer experience, which is likely to lead to new business.

Not every organization will reap the same business-transforming benefits of mobility as the Orlando Brewing Co. or Provincia Seguros. These case studies offer evidence, though, that the business-generating potential of mobility – at least for now – is priceless.

About Joe McGarvey

An Enterprise Mobility Strategist at BlackBerry, McGarvey has covered the enterprise and telecommunications industries for more than 20 years as both a journalist and analyst. He is best-known as a long-time principal analyst at leading market research firm Current Analysis. McGarvey has also been an analyst for Heavy Reading and an editor at several leading technology magazines.

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